Gravity
by Sinvisigoth
Summary: Betrayed by her own kind, does the god she sought wish to do the same? Not everything is as it seems, and Shaw must decide if she wants to continue her journey alone or with a companion she could never have imagined. Shaw/Engineer.


**Copyright****© D. A. Bathory 2014 **

**Prometheus characters and universe are not mine, but the original characters, storyline and wording are mine.**

**Thought I would have a go at a Prometheus fic. I'm strictly Shaw/Engineer for now. I'm taking some liberties by creating my own derivatives of Ancient Sumerian language as I don't believe the Engineers and humans would have had a language that copied exactly between the two. If you don't understand what I mean, see the scene in the original Stargate film where Daniel finds out he's been pronouncing Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs incorrectly. Hope you enjoy the story.**

**Gravity**

**Chapter 01**

**Engineer POV**

There was a swimming feeling in his head that travelled slowly down his neck to his torso, arms and legs, changing to a tingling as long sleeping nerves reawakened. Blurred light and dark shapes moved outside the window of the u-kimah in which he lay. For long moments he could not recall who, or what, he was.

Deeply ingrained muscle memory tensed his body as the customary rush of consciousness began to return him from an empty vessel to a man. The glowing digits on the inside of the u-kimah's window-like lid gave him the current universal chrono, but it would not mean much until he remembered when he had started his sleep.

He pushed the lid upward and outward, rising while his personal history was still filling his conscious mind, making him stumble to one knee as he tried to step away from the safety of the coldsleep chamber. The last archives of his long life settled into place as he raised his eyes, expecting to see his crew around him. They were not.

Faced with five members of the human species and none of his own, he looked between the faces of the interlopers, keeping his face without expression. How were they here? Had they killed his crew? He felt anger filling him at the thought. But a glance at the other coldsleep chambers, broken and dark, told him that was not the case. These creatures, however unwelcome, had had no conflict with the other members of his race; time had been their end and their lights had long since been permanently dimmed.

Two of the humans, one elderly; one ageless, spoke between themselves, glancing at him as they did so. They looked and smelled male for the most part but their voices were higher pitched than males of his own species. He could smell females, though. One seemed to be one of the two armed soldiers, which confused but did not interest him, the other was separated from the other four and was hunched over near the entrance to the navigation room.

Apparently he interested her also, as her high soft voice spoke to him urgently. He ignored the gesticulations and noises of the nearest males, focusing on her more intently. She was small but not tiny for a human, her brow furrowed as she urgently willed him to understand the foreign words she spoke. The presence of a female was always comforting and he felt himself relax slightly, his body unconsciously soothed by her proximity.

He wished he could understand what she was saying, but their language seemed to have nothing at all in common with the many human tongues he had learnt since their kind first developed the spoken word. Looking more closely, however, he could see that whatever she had to say was less important than her physical state. She was injured, he realised, seeing the sheen of sweat on her skin and the constant tremors of her muscles. Her heart beat furiously and the smell…

He drew in a deeper breath, fixing her scent. Blood and birth were mixed with huge amounts of adrenaline. How was she still conscious? She had obviously not long given birth and was in a crippling amount of pain. But he saw no young with her. The only reason for that would be…he felt a pang of grief for her. He had seen the affection that humans lavished on their young and thought that her physical pain might not be the greatest agony she currently endured.

She spoke again and, at a command from the elderly male, one of the armed guards struck her viciously in the stomach with his weapon, while the female guard turned her own weapon on her in obvious threat. He was incensed. For his people violence between males was unacceptable outside of the training arena or the battlefield, but any male who struck a female would not have been permitted to live. For the threat of the pointed weapon, the female guard was reclassified in his mind as some kind of pseudo-male.

He could do nothing to help the injured female physically without moving to her side, so he did the only thing he could, and started to thrum his second diaphragm to direct an infrasonic rumble toward her that was inaudible to the humans. The sound waves were strong, and the pressure from them could be felt instantly, compressing the parasympathetic nervous system in the same way that an embrace would. On his world it was used as both an initiation to mate and to ease the pain of the wounded and dying.

She remained unaware, still curled in on herself in agony, but he saw the minute easing of tension in her muscles and heard her heartbeat slow. Still she tried to speak to him, but her meaning was again lost on him, and his attention captured by the movement of the pale haired human. He was confused by this being. It looked and sounded human, smelled vaguely so, but drew no breath to create the words he made and his chest produced a constant low hum instead of a heartbeat.

His mind chose this moment to makes sense of the time lapse made evident by the chrono in his u-kimah. Two thousand of their Earth years. He had slumbered for over two millennia while his people went through who knows what trials and dangers without him. His panic and scattering thoughts almost made him miss the novelty of the human-like creature speaking in a language he understood. Not his own, but one that his kind had spoken with humans - he calculated the difference - over five thousand years ago.

"Leader Weyland is seek people of you. He wishes more long live and believe people of you give him." It was clumsy but easy enough to comprehend, unfortunately. Of all the things they could have asked of him, none would have decreased his wrath at this point, but the greedy nature of the elder's mission enraged him beyond measure. He touched the creature's head and felt his wrongness, cold and not-alive.

The injured female's loud indrawn breath was the only sound as he wrenched the pale creature's head from its shoulders, using it to strike a lethal blow to the elderly human because he could not bring himself to touch the wrinkled, stinking flesh. That they should ask this of him when he grieved his own lonely state and after having witnessed them abuse their own female was simply more than he could bear. The other two were killed with more swift mercy than he thought they deserved and he forgot them as soon as they hit the floor.

The injured female was visibly panicking and looked in fear between him and the humans he had killed. He had no way to explain that he meant her no harm so he let her leave through the door and set about firing up the ship's diagnostic systems. There was nowhere she could go and he needed to know what capabilities his ship still had, if any. He meant to follow her shortly, but for now the repetitive functions of the ship's relays and lights helped keep his mind from worrying at his unusually long time in coldsleep.

Once all systems were tested, he adjusted his biosuit for the outside atmosphere and set off at a steady pace in pursuit of the human female. Not only was he concerned with her obvious need for medical attention, but producing the infrasonic waves used in mating rituals to comfort her earlier had left his body confused. It did not know the difference between pursuing her and simply following her and was increasing his adrenaline and mating pheromones to dangerous levels.

**Shaw POV**

Shaw had thought for a moment that she saw pity in the alien's eyes, but watching him end the lives of the others with such brutal ease had flooded her with terror. Even the agony of her wound did not slow her much as she raced to exit the ship. She felt its engines come to life as she stumbled from the passageway into the open air but she didn't spare a moment to look back.

By the time she closed in on the landing coordinates of the Prometheus she felt as if her heart were about to burst. Even so she picked up speed as much as she could, knowing she had to get her team away from the planet before the Engineer could heave the bulk of his own craft into the atmosphere to chase them down.

"Janek." She panted into her comms unit. "Janek, come in." The open channel crackled at her for a moment. Then she heard a weak response, one that made sense of the strangely open space that appeared in front of her. She could see geographical anomalies that she knew damn well were behind the Prometheus, but the ship was not where she had left it.

She looked up to scan the skies, her eyes finally settling on a small metallic glint on the far horizon. As it turned it took on more of the shape of the Prometheus. But it was getting smaller, which meant it was travelling away from her, leaving her behind.

"Sh….shaw…-orry…Vickers…forced…-iftoff…so sorr-" Janek's voice, muffled and broken though it was, was full of remorse. Shaw knew he wasn't a coward, wouldn't have moved the ship unless Vickers had threatened the lives of himself and his remaining crew. She didn't blame him. Lifting her eyes to the heavens she saw the plasma trail from the ship's engine's winding up into the atmosphere.

"Miss -ickers…wha-…those things? He…help! Noooo-" The screams that followed the pilot's voice were horrible, and she saw the Prometheus falter in the sky before plummeting back toward the ground, gracelessly, silently. At the last moment the dropship was ejected from the cargo bay doors, speeding sped away from the steeply plunging ship.

She fumbled with the beacon on the sleeve of her suit, finding it difficult to still the shaking in her hands long enough to press the smallish button. Finally she managed to do so, sending the signal that would direct the dropship to set down in the suitable landing spot nearest to her location. She watched it swing toward her as the Prometheus reached the nadir of its descent.

The ion propulsion system achieved critical mass a split second after the ship met the ground, exploding in a doughnut shaped ring of blue static charge. The following shock wave knocked her off her feet, leaving her struggling to draw a breath to scream her grief at the loss of her friends.

Her flattened diaphragm wouldn't let her suck in any oxygen so she flipped to her stomach, forcing herself to retch noisily several times to regain control. Through hiccoughing breaths she vented her pain and anger at the soil beneath her visor. First she wept for her friends, then she wept for herself, the last remaining human in this vast territory.

Shaw spent several minutes like this before her suit helpfully chimed in her ear that she had two minutes of air left. For just a moment, it occurred to her to simply stay there and let it run out. But only a moment. Instead she dragged herself to her knees and then to her feet, setting a long stride in a straight line to the dropship. It sat on the red soil, windows screened and propulsion units hunched like some metallic recluse with no wish for company.

Forty long seconds with no oxygen circulating in her suit felt like an hour as she took the last twenty-eight steps to the hatch and thumped her open palm on the sensor, willing the hatch to open before she lost consciousness. She fell inside with a whoosh and a clamour of relief, almost forgetting that she needed to remove her helmet in order to take advantage of this new, more hospitable environment.

As she lay, gasping, on the floor of the dropship, the magnitude of the last few hours caught up with her and her vision started to shrink to tiny pinpricks, her body deciding that enough was enough for now thank you very much. The pinpricks only stopped shrinking as a crackle over her comms unit caught her attention.

"He's coming." David's voice was as preternaturally calm as ever.

"Who is coming?" Shaw staggered upright and from one side of the airlock to the other before finding her footing. Even without knowing who was heading in her direction, she automatically tried to arm herself. She picked up and discarded several objects frantically, every one useless as a weapon with which to defend herself. David was uncharacteristically silent. "David, who is-" A large crash outside cut off her question; it appeared it was about to be proven unnecessary anyway.

She moved quickly to the first room adjoining the airlock, sealing the thick doors behind her, and her eyes lit upon an axe in one corner. She reached for it and hefted it in her hands, aware of the weakness pervading her muscles. A shrill squeak of protest came from the pneumatic doors and she became aware of a presence other than her own.

Still holding the axe tightly in both hands she swung around, horror washing over her as she saw the giant form of the Engineer pushing the two halves of the door apart, one bulky shoulder forcing its way through, then the other. She backed up, aware that his eyes were locked on hers as his huge frame entered the room. He didn't hesitate but strode swiftly to where Shaw had plastered herself against a bulkhead in fear, his eyes alight with equal measures of purpose and confusion.

One of his enormous hands wrapped around her arm, the other reached toward her abdomen, which made her shrink from him in anticipation of the pain his touch would cause. He paused, snarling under his breath at her retreat, and instead grabbed her hip hard enough to hurt just a little.

She felt a vibration in his hands and although not touching, his chest was close enough to her that she could feel it there, too. She was wrapped in a sudden pressure that first made her squirm even harder, but then she found herself relaxing against her will. Strangely, although there was no sound, she could swear she heard the low rumble on her tongue of all places.

He seemed to take this as a good sign as he lifted her as if she weighed nothing, clutching her closer to him, and for a moment it looked as if he had no more idea why he had done it than she did. His pale brows lowered over his large, dark eyes, furrowing in the middle, but as she saw the confusion in them deepen she felt a part of him press against her, a part the existence of which she hadn't even contemplated until now. But it was real, his obvious excitement was pressed against her most intimate of places and her reaction was instantaneous.

With a cry of horror and understanding she flung her fist behind her head, striking the sensor to the medbay doors hard enough to hurt but not caring. Her scream of triumph as the thick, slick tentacles reached for him was drowned out by his shout of surprise. As the creature came fully through the medbay doors and bore the alien to the floor, she saw hurt and accusation in his eyes. But only for a moment; the godless creation of Weyland's android and her body covered his face swiftly with its flat, fleshy head and she heard only a gurgle as he was silenced.

* * *

><p>Well I hope that satisfies as a first chapter. Let me know what I got right or what I got wrong. I'm enjoying this immensely so I hope you do, too. :D<p>

U-kimah = coldsleep chamber (u = sleep, kimah = tomb)


End file.
